VMware vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Click Below for Plug-ins:

Since I'm preparing to write a short series of aritlces on my recent Home Lab purchases, I figured I should preface those articles with a little history on my current hardware...

During the summer of 2011 around June/July, I wanted to have a home environment to install, configure, and test things - you know, the typical techie Hands-On environment. My requirements were as follows:

Try to keep costs down

Try for quiet equipment

Minimize power consumption

This article will describe the original purchase and progression of the lab.

Two years ago, I wrote a similar article around vCAC's embedded vCO but a lot has changed since then so those older steps no longer apply. This brief article will quickly walk you through the steps required to allow vRealize Automation 7.0/7.1/7.2's embedded vRealize Orchestrator to allow Active Directory Domain accounts login to the vRO Client.

Each time vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) runs a workflow, a token (workflow execution) is added beneath the workflow in the vRO client. By default vRO will keep up to 100 of these tokens! This may be a slight annoyance to people who are only interested in the last 5-20 runs. This article will shed some light on the configuration options you have available to you.

Although vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) has provided API documentation built-in to the server, it was static content that could not be quickly used for tests or building queries. When a product provides a nice API explorer that not only tells you the available urls and basic docs, but also provides a web-based UI that allows you to quickly build up custom calls and shows you the generated content, the consumption and integration time for developers is reduced considerably. This article will provide a brief introduction to Orchestrator's latest API Documentation feature: Swagger !

vCenter 6 has introduced an important new feature for anyone interested in Automation and integration : a REST based endpoint providing access to some of the recent functionality such as the tagging service, the content library and transfer service : It is called "VMware vCloud Suite SDK" and codenamed vAPI. In addition to the REST API it provides language bindings for Java, Python, .NET, Perl and Ruby. If you want to know more about vAPI you can read the blog article I wrote on the VMware CTO Ambassadors blog.The following article is an introduction to using the vAPI REST Endpoint from vRealize Orchestrator REST plug-in. The concepts in this article may be useful even if you plan to consume the REST service with any REST client.

NUC Lab Kit

Below are my thoughts for a vSAN nuc lab. Since I already have cables, not including them here. I ordered (and received by Nov 30, 2016)3 x nuc, 3 x 32GB Crucial mem, 3 x Toshiba NVMe drive, 3 x Startech USB to GB NIC, and 3 x Crucial 1TB SSD. I've also been very happy with my Cisco SG300-10 so I bought one more since my existing one only has one port available. Each of the items listed here are linked below - all were purchased using the provided links below.single NIC (See this post for details on using the USB -> GB NIC item listed below

I stayed with the i5 for the power consumption and form factor vs. the i7 Skull Canyon ;)